The End of Always: A Novel (14 page)

T
he light from the kitchen window cast a dark radiance over the yard. I turned my face away from August’s shoulder and he kissed my forehead the way you would kiss the head of a child. I smiled a little and let my arms fall to my sides and let myself rest against him. I could feel his heart beating.

He gently cupped my face in his hands. “I would do anything for you,” he murmured. “You know that.” He kissed me again. Then he pulled his coat collar up until it stood around his throat. “I will come back soon.”

The fire had burned to coals in the stove but Martha still sat in her straight-backed chair. She looked up at me when I came in. “Are you all right?” she said. “Where have you been?” She stood and crossed the floor and brushed the leaves from my hair and crumbled them into the sink. “You think only of yourself,” she said. “Not of us.”

“I was just outside,” I said.

“Then you know that boy was here.”

“August?”

“No,” she said curtly. “The other one.”

“What other one?”

“The lunatic,” she said. She pointed at the back porch. “He came right up onto the steps. He came right up to the door. When he saw me he ran away. I do not know what he expected. But he was out there like the bogeyman, right there on our back steps.” She hugged herself. “He cannot come here,” she said. “We have a child in this house. What if Hattie saw him? What then?”

“I know,” I said. “I told him.” I reached up and fingered my hair and found a twig and twisted my hair until the twig was free.

“Make it your business to tell him again.”

“I will.” I tossed the twig into the sink.

Martha looked me up and down. “You should see yourself,” she said acidly. “No wonder they talk. Fix yourself. Straighten your skirt.”

I pulled at my waistband until my skirt was straight and combed my fingers through my hair. I did not want to be fixed. I wanted to be outside with August, running away through the night.

Martha sat heavily in her chair. “I have to ask you,” she said. “I think I have a right to know. Is it true?”

“Is what true?”

“Do you go into the woods?”

Did I go into the woods? Of course I went into the woods. I went into the woods every chance I got. When I was a child, I went into the woods to find acorns and stones. When I was older, I went into the woods to draw pictures of ferns. Once I caught a tiny dusty toad and let it hop across the palm of my hand, its eyes bulging and its throat fluttering like its heart beat under its tongue. I went into the woods and counted the eggs I found in a robin’s nest and learned to identify the calls of the wood thrush and the oriole. I looked up at the sky and longed to float free with the hawks that sailed in long slow circles above me. I stood in a place that belonged to no one but me.

“It is not what you think,” I said. I brushed the seat of my skirt and bits of grass fell to the floor.

“Look at yourself.” She leaned back and studied me. “Covered with leaves and dirt and sticks. No decent girl would allow this.”

“So you think I am a whore,” I said. I had no idea how quickly and easily my sister would think the worst of me.

“Do not use that word.”

“Why not?” I said. “That is what this is all about. You have such a low opinion of me that this is the first thing you think when you wonder what’s going on. That I must be a whore. My God, Martha.”

“What else am I supposed to think?”

“I have no idea,” I said slowly. “I guess you are going to think what you want to think. No matter what I say.”

The embers popped and shifted.

“Do you want me to count it down for you?” she said. She held her hand up. “One. You disappear from this house at night. Two. You run around all night in the woods. Three. You ask me to lie for you. Four. You make sure that I am the one who takes your punishment when he finds out.” She ticked the items off on her fingers like this was a list she had been keeping for a while, one that was familiar to her and even comforting, like a story she told herself so she would know what to believe. “Five,” she said. “Strange men are coming to our back door. Six. The whole town is talking.”

“So you side with him,” I said. I thought of the way she stood in the window and looked like my father, with everything about her uncanny, as if he had taken her and shaped her and made her look like himself.

She picked up the stove poker and hefted it against her palm, testing its weight like she might be considering hitting me with it. Then she put it down again. “I am siding with myself,” she said. “Just as you have.”

I leaned against the sink. The neighbor’s dog barked. A voice called and then a door slammed. I listened to the sounds of life falling away and breathed in the hush of a solitary cell. My father’s house. My father’s rules. My father’s crime. I could not bear another minute of it.

“You are going to think what you like,” I said. “I cannot stop you.” I made a big show of casually studying my fingernails, as if what I was about to say was barely important at all. “But right now, August Bethke is at the bar, telling him that we are going to be married.” I looked up at Martha to see how she would take the news. But she just reached over and closed the door on the stove and pushed the latch.

“He will never say yes,” she said. “He will never give you permission to marry that carpenter.”

“August is not asking.”

She glanced at me then, puzzled.

“August is telling, not asking,” I said. “He is explaining how things are going to be.”

I felt proud when I said this, and glad of August’s strength, glad that I had found a man who was willing to go up against my father. I did not tell her that I was afraid. I did not tell her about William Oliver. I did not tell her about Edwin. Instead I leaned against the sink and told her that August loved me and I loved him. Yes, I had been to the woods and I had spent nights with him and I would go again and again for there was something there that I could never find here and that was love and real love and a man who would protect me. I gripped the sink with my hands. We had found our way to each other as if by spell or fate. We would never lose each other. I was to be his forever and he would always be mine.

I spoke with the conviction of a girl who has never been in love before, never followed its rocky path, never seen that change comes upon each of us, never discovered that sometimes, when a door closes, God does not open a window, nor does he open a door, nor is there a way out. I was massively infected with my own innocence, a disease for which there is only one cure.

Martha watched me, a peculiar expression on her face. I thought she would say something mean and cruel, which would prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that she had no way to refute anything I had just said. But all she did was give a small bitter laugh. “Marie,” she said, “you are even more foolish than I thought.” And then she stood up and went to bed.

I sat in the kitchen for a long time. Our house was silent. For all the things I had said to Martha, I had failed to tell her about William Oliver. And I should have told her about Edwin. I told myself that she was being ridiculous. She could not understand if she did not have all the facts and I had stupidly withheld these. I counted up the things I should have known and should have done and wondered if the choking feeling in my throat might have gone away if I had been able to get everything out. Then I wondered if she would have believed me even if I had been able to get it all out. The William Oliver story seemed preposterous but then it did not. In fact, it was no more preposterous than the fact that my father had murdered my mother.

Rain pelted the windows and I heard a sound that was not rain. When I turned, I found Hattie standing in the doorway to the hall, a phantom child in her white nightgown. She swayed and caught the doorway in one hand. Then she came and stood next to me.

“What do you see?” she asked. She looked out into the yard.

“Shhh,” I said. I put a finger to my lips. “Why are you up?”

“I could not sleep.” She folded her arms across her chest. “Why are you up?”

“I could not sleep, either.”

“What is that sound?”

“It is the rain,” I said. “See?”

We stood at the sink and looked out into the yard.

“It is beautiful,” she said.

“Come on,” I said. “I have an idea.”

I walked out to the mudroom and sat on the bench and took off my mother’s shoes and rolled my torn stockings down over each knee. I unbuttoned my blouse and slipped it off and dropped it on the floor. I unfastened the hook at the waistband of my skirt and let my skirt fall on top of my blouse.

Hattie watched me. “What are you doing?” she said.

I turned the knob and let the door fall open and then stepped out onto the porch. Rough floorboards, soft rain, the sound of water in the dark. I looked back at my sister. “Be careful,” I said. “Watch for splinters. And keep your voice down.”

A pallid mist drifted across the yard and hung under the black trees. If all the souls lost on the earth had stepped out of that night I would not have been surprised. Hattie followed me down the stairs and onto the wet grass.

“Look up,” I said.

She turned her face to the sky. The rain fell on us as if we were sightless. I opened my arms and began to turn in slow circles, pivoting on one heel, my toes sunk and releasing in the mud. I turned faster and faster and then Hattie spread her arms slowly, as if testing the air, and then she spun beside me. I did not care if Martha woke up. I did not care if the neighbors turned their lights on and stood on their porches and turned their dogs on us and burned their trash and gave us evil looks. I laughed and Hattie laughed, too, her hair sleek against her head like the wet pelt of some slippery animal. We were like lost girls then, made of rainwater and the night. I wondered if our mother could see us, if she had taken her place in the sky and could look down at us and laugh at the way we were nowhere to be found but in her absence had become completely free.

Then Hattie ran from me and twirled under the trees and I ran to catch her and she screamed and ducked and dodged until, finally breathless, I caught up with her. I put my arms around her and rested my cheek on her wet hair, her chest heaving and the sharp pain of my own breath under my bruised ribs. I did not care. Rain washed over us and the trees creaked and dripped in the night.

“Isn’t it wonderful?” I said.

She shivered. “It makes me feel alive,” she said.

I pulled back and looked at her, teeth chattering, hair wet and hanging around her shoulders.

“You need a bath,” I said.

“So do you.”

“I will fetch the water. You go inside and take everything off in the mudroom.”

“You will wake Martha,” she warned.

“So?” I said.

“She’ll be mad,” she said. And then she grinned.

“I do not care,” I said.

I rolled the washtub out from under the sink and set it in the middle of the room. I struck a kitchen match and lit the lamp with its red glass shade. When the water had just begun to steam I lifted the copper and emptied it into the washtub. Hattie lowered herself into the water. I gave her an old tin cup and a bar of Fels soap so she could wash her hair. I leaned against the sink and watched her. The smell of rain and earth filled the kitchen. She slid down in the tub until the water came up to her shoulders.

“Tell me a story,” she said.

The clock ticked in the front room. I pulled a chair up next to the washtub. The only stories I knew were my mother’s stories and I picked one.

I told her about an old nobleman who lived alone near Garz, back on the island that was haunted by the golden seagull and the dwarves and the bells under the sea. I told her that there was a small castle in the woods, with spires and turrets and a drawbridge to keep everyone out. The woods themselves were haunted by black dwarves. You could often see their footprints in the sand, thousands of them, like a band of unruly children had been dancing along the water’s edge. The old nobleman lived in the castle. He had once had three beautiful daughters and they were known far and wide as the fair-haired maidens, but he had been cruel to them and they had left him all at once. Now he lived alone. He’d been a hunter and a sportsman but he withdrew from all activities and did only the few things that still pleased him: he sat alone, he drank alone, he ate alone. He spent all of his time thinking about the black dwarves who lived in his woods. They were the worst of their kind and the old nobleman would have been better off afraid of them. They had ways that were unknown to men and they liked to play tricks. They carried hatchets and wore armor that no blade could pierce. If they caught you alone, you might as well say your prayers.

“But, like all dwarves, the black dwarves could be overcome. If you had the cap that belonged to a dwarf, you had his magic. If you had the glass shoe that belonged to a dwarf, you had his power. One day the old nobleman came across a tiny silver bell. He knew what it was right away and picked it up and put it in his pocket.”

Hattie sloshed in the bath. “So he rang the bell and asked the dwarf to bring his daughters back,” she said.

I shook my head. “That is what you would think,” I said. “But that is not what happened. The old nobleman called the dwarf to him and asked for riches. He asked for wine. He asked for a great table laden with meat and fine food of every description. Then he asked for beautiful clothes, a cape and soft leather boots and a set of chain mail made of chased silver. A helmet made of gold.

“The dwarf brought all of these things. But he grew tired of the man’s demands, for the man always wanted more. One day the dwarf decided he would turn himself into a bird and fly over the nobleman’s castle and see what he could see. This he did. Down below he saw the nobleman sitting in his courtyard, surrounded by his treasure, all alone. The next time the nobleman rang the bell, the dwarf did not appear. Instead, an old woman walked up to the castle gate. The nobleman tried to send her away. He wanted his dwarf. But the old woman said that when he rang the bell, he’d called her. Now he must tell her what he wanted. Of course, the old woman was the dwarf in disguise but the nobleman did not know that. He told the old woman that he did not need to listen to her and she should go away before he gave her something to be sorry about. But the old woman just laughed and stood at his gate and did not leave. She leaned on a white staff and on it there were strange carvings in an ancient language that the nobleman did not know.